AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She talked to him a little more, but it was just noise, really; he wasn’t hearing her, and she had to resign herself to the fact that Carl, like Lynnette, just wasn’t ready yet. He’d get there. He’d have to.
Easy for you to say, part of her mocked. You don’t have to explain things to your kids. Except that she forced that out of her mind, too, every day…that she’d never have kids to explain it to, never hold her own baby, never see her child grow up. That had been taken from her, along with her life, in the basement of Fairview Mortuary, and she’d never get it back. The nanites coursing through her bloodstream could keep her walking, talking, doing almost everything the living could do…but not that.
The door was closed.
Carl walked out ten minutes later, and she sat for a while, sipping the last of her drink and feeling a little comforted by the busy, self-absorbed bustle of those around her. Like Carl, she felt like a ghost, an alien, a fake. And they come to me for help, she thought. As if I had any idea what I was doing.
Her phone rang. Oh God, it was Lynnette, again. Damn. Bryn felt a bright, sudden burst of fury, and answered. “Mrs. Renfer, I mean it. You need to stop calling—”
A scream exploded out of the phone, wordless and full of horror, and Bryn almost dropped it. “Lynnette?” She stood up, shoving the table back as she did so. Her almost-empty cup tipped over and spilled milky fluid. “Lynnette! What’s going on?”
It was chaos on the other end of the phone, screaming, shouting—a man’s voice—Lynnette begging don’t, don’t, don’t…
And then an ear-shattering blast of sound.
Lynnette’s screaming stopped.
Bryn stood very still, unable to breathe. She could still hear the man’s hoarse, half-sobbed curses.
And the sound of children crying.
And then two more quick blasts.
Only the man’s sobbing now.
And then one more blast.
And silence.
Bryn numbly hung up the call, stared at the phone a moment, then dialed Patrick McCallister’s number. He answered on the second ring.
“Lynnette Renfer,” she said. “Meet me at her house. Pat? I think it’s bad. ”
He didn’t ask. He just said, “I’m on my way. ”
Bryn made it to Lynnette’s small suburban home on the northern outskirts of San Diego in ten minutes, but she didn’t remember the drive. All she could hear was the sound of the crying, the shots, the silence. When she pulled in at the curb, she saw that Patrick McCallister had arrived ahead of her, in a nondescript dark sedan.
There was another car already there—like Patrick’s, it was a dark sedan, and it had a government plate on the back. Bryn wasn’t too surprised to see the front door open and Riley Block step out. “You’d better come inside,” she said to them. “This isn’t a discussion we should have in front of the neighbors. ”
“Police?” Patrick asked as they crossed the threshold.
“Called off,” Riley said. Up close, Bryn could see the lines of stress around her eyes, her mouth, although she was doing a good job of holding her poker face. “It’s just us chickens. Come on. She’s going to wake up soon, and I’ll need some help. ”
Riley had brought along another FBI agent Bryn didn’t know, but he was clearly read in on Pharmadene or he wouldn’t be here. He looked up and nodded as the three of them entered the Renfers’ living room, and Riley went to talk with him quietly in a corner.
Bryn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see, but she forced herself to do it. Two small bodies lay near the sofa. Lynnette was dead on the blood-soaked cushions, the phone still clutched in her hand.
The husband, unrecognizable, lay with the shotgun fallen next to him. The place smelled like fresh hot blood, loosened bowels, gunpowder, and…obscenely…fresh cinnamon.
“He saw her cut herself and heal,” Bryn said. “Last night. She told me. I kept telling her she had to bring him in. I told her that…” She felt…well, she didn’t particularly feel anything, at the moment. Just revulsion, with an edge of horror that only sliced when she looked at the bodies straight on. So she focused on the walls. Safe enough, until she saw the big, framed formal portrait photo. Lynnette and her husband, sitting with hands clasped. The two little girls in their laps.
A simple, adorable family, glowing with happiness.
The breath went out of her in a rush, and she felt her knees start to give. Patrick’s hand was right there when she needed it, bracing her elbow, giving her an anchor to cling to as the world began to drift dizzily away.
“I was on the phone with her,” Bryn said softly. “When this happened. She was begging him not to…Why? Why would he do this?”
She thought it was a rhetorical question, but Riley answered it. “He wrote a note on his laptop, time-stamped about thirty minutes ago. According to him, this was the only way. He thought some kind of demon had taken over his wife,” Riley said. “He didn’t want it to get into him and his girls. He was so scared he thought death was better. ”
